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    <name><![CDATA[Rick]]></name>
    <location><![CDATA[Brooklyn, NY]]></location>        
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      <rating>2</rating>
  <votes>7</votes>
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  <read_at>Fri Dec 01 00:00:00 -0800 2006</read_at>
  <date_added>Sun Jan 13 08:18:40 -0800 2008</date_added>
  <date_updated>Sun Jan 13 08:21:15 -0800 2008</date_updated>
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    <body><![CDATA[The first big mistake I made was deciding to buy the 2.0 edition of the book (updated and expanded). Redundancy is one of the book’s signature features so updating and expanding it only compounds the sins of this feature. My second big mistake was deciding to finish reading it after first running aground about half way through and taking a several month sabbatical to read more worthy books. All right I’m being testy. It wasn’t such a big mistake. Friedman is a smart guy but way too full of himself, the book’s title is sufficient evidence of that—The World Is Flat, too cute and not up to the belaboring it gets—and the false (on three fronts) humility of the subtitle. The book isn’t brief and it is not a history, nor is there any humility in the pretend irony of “A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century”. Indeed there is no humility in this book that isn’t a pretence designed to cast the author’s brilliance in finer relief. And the man thinks he is Adam set loose in a new conceptual world where he is entitled to name anything and everything. You can run out of fingers and toes, even if you borrow those of friends and family, counting the times Friedman begins a sentence or phrase with a variation of “something I like to call…” I don’t know in the whole history of publishing if there is a writer who claimed coining so many phrases, the majority of which are as pedestrian as they come. It’s not just “flat world” and the concept of “flattening” or “the coefficient of flatness,” it’s “Globalization 1.0” and it’s 2.0 and 3.0 descendents, it’s “In-forming”, it’s “glocalization,” it’s, oh, why go on. This book had all the makings of an outstanding essay or two or three very good Sunday Times magazine features. It’s got the trends in business, technology, and perhaps culture and politics right. It’s by turns inspiring, scary, and tediously bloated. It is a wearying, self-promotional exercise in over and over re-stating what’s became obvious twelve anecdotes and 34 declarations ago. The best part of the book and, for me, it’s only enduring redeeming value is its bookmark, a Valentine’s Day card, handmade by my fiancée. But I don’t think that came with everyone’s copy.]]></body>
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